At The Porch restaurant in Midtown, Sacramento, one of the most popular side dishes on the menu is Candied Yams. Back in the kitchen, sous chef Matt Sonzust reaches into a box, clearly labelled : “JUMBO GARNET YAMS."...

...But the truth is, they’re not yams — and it’s very likely most Americans have never eaten a real yam. Real yams originated in and are now mostly commercially grown in Africa.

Everything produced and sold in the United States as a yam is really a sweet potato. The two aren’t even very closely related biologically.

-- though I'll add to it that while that article says the sweetpotatoes called yams are the moister ones, I've run into customers who think they're the dryer ones.

And I'm currently (well, currently as in last year and probably next; not as in during late November in NYState) growing a variety called "Mahon Yam". Which reduces the number of times that I'm asked at market 'Are those sweet potatoes or yams?' and have to go through the whole spiel about none of them actually being yams; but probably only increases customer confusion overall.

I don't see the problem with using the word. If consumers will never see a "real" yam and they've been calling sweet potatoes yams for centuries and it's a loan word to begin with, what difference does it make?

I was at the self checkout at a grocery store (rhymes with waif pay), trying to find the product code for my bag of orangy-pink tubers. No sweet potatoes on the list. I tried vegetables, potatoes, all items, alphabetical, nothing.

The guy comes over to help and says "We do not have sweet potatoes at Waif pay, we have yams."

I'm thinking to myself, "I thought there were no yams in the U.S., or maybe it was everything is a yam and we don't have sweet potatoes, I can never remember which it is."

While I am certainly one to point out that a sweet potato isn't a yam, I'm beginning to sympathize with an article I read a while back that proposed we stop drawing lines about (f'rinstance) what's a monkey and what's an ape based solely on scientific classifications and related genetics. Everyday people call something what they call it, and scientists saying Hominoidea are apes and not monkeys doesn't change that. Today I often hear starfish being called "sea stars" - a name I'm sure was never common in everyday usage - because they aren't fish. (They aren't stars either, but that never seems to matter.)

All that being said, for the sake of knowing what I'm talking about I still strive to not call sweet potatoes yams, not call muskmelons cantaloupes, and not call the cassia bark in my kitchen cinnamon. I fear I am turning into a crackpot.

Actually, to a biologist, everything that's an ape is also a monkey. Apes evolved from animals that were monkeys and modern taxonomy is based on inclusion rather than exclusion, so apes are therefore monkeys just like they're mammals.